You Are God - Alan Watts on Embracing Your Divine Nature

most study of comparative religions that goes on in theological schools has historically been missionary oriented to find out the weird ideas of the prospects so as to be able to undermine them because you see if you know in the first place that you have the true religion there really is no point in studying any other one and you can very quickly find reasons for showing them to be inferior because that was a foregone conclusion they had to be and therefore all arguments about the respective merits of various religions especially where Christianity is involved and often

where Judaism is involved and sometimes Islam too all of which are essentially imperialistic religions in all such discussions the judge and The Advocate are usually the same person because if for example you get into discussions as to whether Buddha was a more profound and spiritual character than Jesus Christ uh you arrive at your decision on the basis of a scale of values which is of course Christian and in this sense the judge and The Advocate are the same and I really do Marvel at this Christian imperialism because it prevails even among theological liberal liberal and

it reaches its final absurdity in religionless Christianity the doctrine that there is no God and Jesus Christ is his only son uh because you see there's some anxiety here that even though we don't believe in God anymore somehow we've still got to be Christians and obviously because we have a very curious organization which must be understood the inner meaning of the church as it works in fact a society of the saved you see necessarily requires outsided a society of the not saved because if there is not that contrast you don't know that you belong to

the in-group and in this way all social groups with claims to some kind of special status must necessarily create aliens and foreigners and Saint Thomas Aquinas let the cat out of the bag one day when he said that the Saints in heaven would occasionally appear over the battlements into hell and praise God for the just punishment visited upon evildoers now as you know I'm not being very fair and very kind to um modern theology but there is this strange Persistence of insisting that our group is the best group and I feel that there is in

there something peculiarly uh irreligious and furthermore it exhibits a very strange lack of faith because I believe that there is a strong distinction between faith on the one hand and belief on the other that belief is as a matter of fact quite contrary to Faith because belief is really wishing it's from the Anglo-Saxon root Leaf to wish and belief stated say in the Creed is a fervent hope that the universe will turn out to be thus and so and in this sense therefore belief precludes the possibility of faith because faith is openness to truth to

reality whatever it may turn out to be I want to know the truth that is the attitude of faith and therefore to use ideas about the universe and about God as something to hang on to in the spirit of Rock of Ages cleft for me you know him Hymnal imagery is full of rocks A Mighty Fortress Is Our God in vain the surgery's angry shark in vain the drifting sand unharmed upon the Eternal Rock The Eternal cities dance and there's something very rigid about a rock and we are finding our Rock getting rather worn out

in an age where it becomes more and more obvious that our world is a floating world it's a world floating in space where all positions are relative and any point may be regarded as the center a world which doesn't float on anything and therefore the religious attitude appropriate to our time is not one of clinging to rocks but of learning to swim and you know that if you get in the water and you have nothing to hold on to and you try to behave as you would on dry land you will drown but if on

the other hand you trust yourself to the water and let go you will float and this is exactly the situation of faith this is surely all implied in the New Testament uh when for example Jesus began to foretell his own death his disciples were very disturbed because it is written in our law that the Messiah does not die and he replied unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die it remains isolated and brings forth no fruit or of it but if it die it brings forth much fruit and on another occasion he

said to the disciples it is expedient for you that I go away for if I go not away the paraclete the Holy Spirit cannot come to you but we have reversed all this Jesus to me it was one of those rare and remarkable individuals who had a particular kind of spiritual experience which in terms of Hebrew theology he found most difficult to express without blasphemy I am the father are one in other words I am God and that is something of course if you are a Hindu that is a rather natural statement to make you

see in our culture which has Hebrew theology in its background anyone who says I am God is either Blasphemous or insane because our image of God and the image don't forget has far more emotional power than any amount of Theology and abstraction it is Our Father which really influences us as a conception of God not necessary being or Telex decontaminated name for God the ground of being or Professor northrop's undifferentiated aesthetic continuum [Music] these aren't very moving even though subtle theologians prefer this kind of thing and will tell us that when we call God the

Father we don't have to believe literally that there is a cosmic male parent and still does that he has a white beard and sits on a golden throne above the Stars nobody no serious Theologian ever believed in such a god but nevertheless the imagery affects us because the image of the monotheistic god of the West is political the title king of kings and Lord of lords is the title of the Emperors of ancient Persia the image of God is based on the Pharaohs the great rulers of the Chaldeans and the kings of Persia and so

this is the political governor and Lord of the universe who keeps order and who rules it from metaphorically speaking above so anyone who would say I am God is therefore implying that he's in charge of everything that he knows all about it and therefore everybody else sought to Bow Down and Worship Him but in India if you say I am God they say congratulations at last you found out because the image is quite different see our image of the world is that the world is a construct and it's very natural for a child to say

to its mother how was I made as if you know you were somehow put together but that goes back to the imagery of Genesis where God creates Adam and makes a clay figurine and then he breathes the breath of life into this to the nostrils of this figurine and it comes to life so there is the fundamental supposition which even underlies the development of Western science that everything has been made and then someone knows how it was made and you can find out because behind the universe there is an architect this could be called the

ceramic model of the universe because there's a basic feeling that there are two things in existence one is stuff material and the other is form now material like clay by itself is stupid it has no life in it has no intelligence and therefore for matter to assume orderly forms it requires that an external intelligence be introduced to shape it and therefore with that deeply embedded in our common sense it's very difficult for people to realize that this image is not necessarily for description of the world at all indeed the whole idea of stuff is completely

absent from Modern physics which studies the physical Universe purely in terms of pattern and structure but the Hindu model of the world and I'm speaking of Hindu mythology the popular imagery I'm talking about the popular imagery on both sides I'm not at the moment getting into theological technicalities the Hindu model of the universe is a drama the world is not made it is acted and so behind every face human animal plant mineral there is the face or non-face of the Central Self the Atman which is Brahman the final reality which is not defined because obviously

that which is the center cannot be made an object of knowledge any more than you bite your own teeth or lift yourself up by your own bootstraps it's what there is it's the basis and you are it